NAIROBI, Kenya (Morning Star News) – A 12-year-old girl who was hospitalized for two weeks after her Muslim father beat her and her sister for converting to Christ last month is traumatized after learning that her sister died from the assault, sources said.

Naigaga Saidah’s father, Imam Abudalah Ali of Bwita mosque in Kaliro District, allegedly beat to death her 15-year-old sister, Namugonya Jamirah, on Dec. 11 after the sisters put their trust in Christ at a five-day evangelistic event that ended that day. Beaten unconscious, Naigaga did not learn of her sister’s death until a pastor had transferred her to safety in another town on Jan. 7, sources said.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the spring of 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians rose up in protest to demand democracy and freedom and an end to the dictatorship of the Syrian President. The response of the regime was to escalate the methods of repression that had been tried and tested against political opponents since the 1970s: arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture.

PRESIDENT Barack Obama said today that the US is "doing anything we can" to rescue an American woman being held hostage by the so-called Islamic State terrorist group.

Mr Obama said that both the US and its allies were using all the tools they have available to try to locate the 26-year-old woman.

In excerpts of an TV interview with America's NBC network released today, Mr Obama said: "Obviously this is something that is heart-breaking for the family and we want to make sure we do anything we can to make sure that any American citizen is rescued from this situation."

At least 19 people have been killed and several injured by a bomb strapped to a girl reported to be about age 10 in north-eastern Nigeria, police say.
The bomb exploded in a market in the city of Maiduguri, in Borno state."The explosive devices were wrapped around her body," a police source told Reuters.No group has said it carried out the attack. The market is reported to have been targeted twice in a week by female bombers late last year.Correspondents say that all the signs point to the militant Islamist Boko Haram group.

Unconfirmed reports claim that in at least one case, the woman was sentenced to death as her new husband found that she was not a virgin.Both incidents of death by stoning have been reported from Al Raqqa Province."The Islamic State carried out, for the second time in 24 hours, the punishment of Al Rajem (stoning to death for adultery) against another woman in the city of Al Raqqa in a square near the Municipal Stadium," an official from NGO Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) stated.The stoning, which was first reported by the SOHR, has also been confirmed by Al Jazeera which claimed that the first stoning took place in a public square in the town of Tabaqa on Thursday evening.

A new kind of honor violence against women has emerged in Turkey: the murdering of women seeking divorce from their husbands.
Last month on an Istanbul street, Hulya Cadirci, a 28-year old mother in the middle of divorce proceedings, was stabbed to death by her 40-year old husband in front of their child. Hulya’s murder is the latest in the 287 cases that have been documented by a Turkish human rights and advocacy group “We Will Stop Women Murders.”